• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, May 14, 2012

It may seem like the digital newsstand appeared in only the last two years, but Zinio has been at it since 2001. After launching on PCs, it now offers some 5,000 magazine titles across major tablet and smartphone platforms like iOS, Android and BlackBerry. Users can buy single issues and subscriptions as well as sample free content through Zinio.

With an explosion of rival newsstand and reader apps in the last couple of years, Zinio has to make sure it doesn’t get bypassed by everyone from Amazon to Zite. Mobile Marketing Daily sat down with Zinio CMO Jeanniey Mullen to talk about how the company is responding to the new landscape

MMD: Given Zinio’s decade-long history, what’s it like seeing so many new competitors emerge and grab attention in this space lately?

Mullen: It’s frustrating to see the press come out and talk about them as if this concept has never existed before. But it is what it is, and we see any news about digital reading, digital magazines, digital distribution, and publication sales as positive for us because it helps to increase consumer awareness and education. There are millions of consumers out there that don’t even know they can read magazines digitally.

MMD: That said, did it take the arrival of the iPad to ignite wider interest?

Mullen: We really see April 3, 2010 -- the day the iPad came out -- to be the start of the digital magazine publishing groundswell, for two reasons: one is that the iPad is the perfect device built for magazines, and it really helped customers see what could be done. But it also helped to get the publishers to focus on development. Publishers started working with us because they knew they needed to have a digital presence, but it wasn’t necessarily a priority for them before the iPad.

MMD: With the wave of publishers launching individual digital editions last year, were you concerned about the impact on your business?

Mullen: Early on, we realized the majority of people subscribing to digital editions are brand new people to the title. So we just saw that amplify itself almost 100-fold when the iPad came out and magazines started doing their own apps. So if you go to Zinio to get your Rolling Stone, you’ll be able to explore other articles and titles in that category. We see that up to 85% of digital subscriptions through Zinio are people that have never had a print subscription with that company. So we don’t see it as competitive at all.

MMD: What about Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple all launching competing newsstands last year?

Mullen: The key thing publishers are starting to focus on now is on renewal rates. You can get a mass number of people to sign up for a free 30-day or 90-day subscription, but as the market is rolling into a full first year for a lot of these different devices, we’re starting to see renewal rates. And that’s where a lot of the truth is going to come out over the second half of the year -- as far as not only which devices are best for consuming content, but which devices and which [newsstands] offerings are really gathering consumers’ interest on an ongoing basis.

MMD: What differences in usage are you seeing across the three screens -- PCs, tablets and smartphones?

Mullen: The iPad subscribers tend to be older -- in the 40s to 50s demographic -- men more than women, but a lot of householding of the purchases. So it might the father’s credit card, but it’s the wife and children also using it. For Android, since it's more smartphones than tablets in the marketplace, it skews a little more women, a bit younger. For PCs it’s close to 50/50. People who come in through Facebook or other social channels are definitely younger, so it’s completely differentiated based on who you are and where you’re coming from.

MMD: Is that where content bundling comes in for Zinio?

Mullen: At any given time, we’ve got about 100 different bundles running, but 100 out of 5,000 [magazines] doesn’t necessarily make it easier to find. A lot of those bundles are promoted on the publisher’s pages. So we’ve been working behind the scenes to make the discovery of bundles a lot more relevant -- and from our side, to proactively make recommendations of bundles people would like rather than showing them everything.

MMD: Where are most of your subscription sales coming from?

Mullen: It’s split between iPad and PC. But we track both buying behavior and reading behavior. And we see that the majority of time spent reading is on the tablet, second is the PC and third is the smartphone. One of the highest reading times is during the local time zone’s morning commute, which makes sense. But the highest buying times for smartphones and tablets are evenings, weekends and holidays.

MMD: How do you go about getting distribution for Zinio besides via the various app stores?

Mullen: Two years ago we made the decision strategically to do a lot of pre-install deals with Android devices. So Zinio is pre-installed on 25 Android tablets and 37 Android smartphones type around the world. We also have deals directly with Motorola, Samsung, LG, and Pan Digital and Kobo. At the same time we have distribution deals with AT&T and T-Mobile and other mobile networks as well. So the app is on millions of Android devices.

MMD: Do you see this new crop of content aggregators like Flipboard, Zite and Pulse as competitors on mobile devices?

Mullen: We definitely see them as complementing the market on educating people on how they can read. We look at what they’re doing from an innovation standpoint and make some decisions on whether any of those features are something you’d consider or not. But we don’t see them as a competitor -- two different business models. They’re looking at articles that get brought into a personal feed; we’re looking at magazines that are managed in libraries.

MMD: Do you have any plans to promote Zinio more as a brand itself?

Mullen: We have a series of pretty big enhancements and product releases coming out over the summer, so we have been holding off on doing a big Zinio push until some of those are live. We’re actually changing the entire structure of our site to build as a foundation for some other very large changes that we’re working on this summer relating to HTML5 and some business model changes. So as those hit market toward end of summer/early fall, then you’ll see a whole lot about that.